1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic calendaring system. More particularly, the present invention relates to an iterative system and method for assisting a user when entering information related to a new calendar event.
2. Discussion of Prior Art
An electronic calendaring system is designed to maintain useful information for a user. The system allows maintenance of a personal schedule of activities such as keeping up with meetings and events; maintaining a to-do list; creating notes and memos; keeping up with special events and holidays; sharing calendar and schedule meetings with others; responding to invitations for events created by others; and maintaining information pertinent to events that have long expired.
Absent from the prior art electronic calendaring systems is a method of relating past event histories to the entry of future events. If a user was going to attend a conference in New York and had attended the same conference last year, it would be useful if the information previously entered in their electronic calendar was readily available without searching back through the calendar. In the past, the structured information entered in their electronic calendar was typically discarded and not reused. What is therefore needed is an interactive system and method for assisting a calendar user through the use of prior historical choices.
Systems have been developed for associating events in general. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,283,856, issued to Gross et al., discloses an event-driven rule-based messaging system and a conditional rule-based messaging system which is transparently implemented for use in electronic mail applications. Particular events may be associated with a specific mail message, and/or rule(s), to promote efficient mapping of messages, events, and rules, so that only rules which monitor a specific event are invoked upon occurrence of the event. However, this patent makes no mention of intelligently guiding the user by producing a contextual-based sequence of entry templates with historically predictable entries based upon previous activities.
Other systems are known which provide basic default entry selections used in filling in various data fields. Known systems include: Quicken""s xe2x80x9cQuickfillxe2x80x9d(trademark) function which fills in a previous entry as a default; Microsoft Money (trademark) associates categories with previous expenses, and Microsoft Intellisense(trademark) which provides a drop-down list of sites visited earlier when browsing the Web (WWW) as well as non-contextbased automatic form completion. However, as with the Gross et al. reference, these references make no mention of intelligently guiding the user by producing a contextual-based sequence of entry templates with historically predictable entries based upon previous activities.
The prior art fails to include the above noted features as well as other benefits described, illustrated and claimed hereafter.
The instant invention presents the user with an intelligent sequence of forms which query the user about events (hereinafter, event and activity will be used in the specification interchangeably) such as hotels for travel, attendees for meeting, etc. The initial information contained within the forms is generated by looking at previous records generated by the user; or in the case of a first time use, either selected defaults or blanks for data entry. Furthermore, the system automatically presents the user with an option to select a new activity or maintain the previous one. By recalling this event history, the calendaring system simplifies planning for the user, or refreshes the user""s memory.
Business travelers, for example, frequently revisit the same location many times. When a location is revisited, it is useful to bring back information such as xe2x80x9cwhat hotel did an individual stay at last time?xe2x80x9d, or xe2x80x9chow did an individual get from the airport to his/her destinationxe2x80x9d. Such information is automatically derived by looking at past events in the user""s own calendar. A forms repository contains many event entry templates to assist the user in data entry. The present invention intelligently selects and sequences the best forms to create a fully usable structured entry sequence for event information.